Far, far more people die from traffic accidents than from terrorism. It would make far, far more sense to sacrifice freedom and democracy for the sake of saving traffic lives. The same goes for tobacco, alcohol, and many other causes of death. Terrorism is really tiny. Sacrificing democracy for such a tiny cause makes no sense.
Excellent post: a Slashdot Hall-of-Fame nominee.
Forget the terrorists. Deranged Islamists included, nobody hates our freedoms as much as we ourselves do. Or more precisely: as our rulers do. Our rulers have bent and malformed our liberties, keeping us in hallucinatory levels of fear so we will be obedient. This odious game sickens every free-thinking man and woman.
For one sharp view on this problem, see Adam Curtis' series of insightful and often amusing BBC films streamable via Google Video. Pick any one, they're all brilliant:
...presently, however, the entire Apple campus has more serious concerns. Namely, debating whether to make the new reflective dock more opaque and less reflective, or more reflective and less opaque. No decision will be made in this more pressing matter until all viable options have been weighed and cross-checked violently against the Human Interface Guidelines by interns prepared to impale themselves upon the nearest pixel for The Cause, or until Steve Jobs has a screaming jag and fires some poor sap who didn't genuflect long enough. Whichever comes first. For now, don't move any files, mmkay?
People are always asking me, "Professor MacSnappy, why do you buy your music from iTMS?"
No one reason, I reply stroking the Van Dyke beard that looks so rakish with a black turtleneck (it has fully grown back in since that regrettable incident with the calipers, thank you for asking).
For a full analysis of my shopping habits, perhaps it is better if I quote from my ten part, 3,400-word blog post on the subject, which can be found carefully archived at my site, DaringTurdball.com.
"When I see a new car ad on TV and just have to 'run out' and buy the music playing in the background, there are few things I like to put in order first. You might call them 'ducks,' and say I am getting them 'in a row'--but just make sure it's a digital row, and that the ducks are all downsampled audio recordings. Ha, ha--or should I say, Quack quack!"
"One, I don't want too high a bitrate. High bitrates are known to use up A.R.S.E. (Auditory Response Synchronization Energy), a finite resource found in the resonant bones that frame the auditory canal. In layman's terms, higher bitrates wear out ears faster. You only have so much A.R.S.E. Why splurge?"
"Second, I take the 'fidelity' in high fidelity seriously. That's why I want to lock down my music as securely as a 13th century feudal lord securing his wife's genitals before he rides off to the Crusades. Doing so requires strong DRM so that my musical 'honey pots' don't end up getting 'stirred' by any other portable music players. I like knowing my songs are safe and won't be getting roughly used by a Zune on the side."
"Third, like most Americans, I don't want to pay too little. Everyone knows there's a direct relationship between price and quality. I like knowing my song has received that extra special touch of attention, even if it's just someone leaving on a light for it at Apple. Who knows? Maybe while it was waiting to be downloaded, The Steve walked by and gave it the old 'thumbs up' or even a 'peace sign'!"
"Adequately priced low-bitrate songs belted down with high-quality DRM so that they won't fall out of my iPod: yes, it's what I call a musical 'match made in heaven'--thank you, iTMS!"
Shipley has developed some amazing apps for the Mac
If by "amazing" you mean the flowchart/planning stuff and an app for making lists of your DVD collection, then please stop bloviating. The Omni apps are competent but suffer from needlessly complex UI. Delicious Monster is a vanity app. Do something about your low amazement threshold before the next daffodil reduces you to tears.
The N800 is compatible with no external software in particular. The N800 can't do H.264, can't retain sound sync in movie playback of the few formats it does support,
Rubbish.
I own the N800 and it's been many months since a firmware update fixed its sound synching problems.
Furthermore, while it's true the N800 can't do H.264, who cares? It does Divx. I shouldn't have to tell you why that's more important to most people online.
As for compatibility, it's a tiny Linux box. There's more software for it than there ever will be for the Touch. And free, as in beer.
True, the N800 UI isn't as slick as Apple's legendary work. But it's quite far from being primitive or backwards -- the rant you link to is absurdly fussy. With all due respect to the designer, UIs have come a long way since the Newton, and we're all pretty able to figure out how to use them.
And yes I do expect Apple will slaughter the n800. Nokia's unsure how to market it and frankly, few want to carry around electronic devices for reading and entering text. The Touch's great virtue is that it speaks directly to a trendy, post-literate tribe: the very people who want to see YouTube videos of guys crashing BMX bikes into a river or catch the latest Shakira video. Touch away, darlings.
"When these things are created, they're going to be so weak, it'll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab," he said. "But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen."
Had Carmack's rocket killed someone (or many people), he would would have been stopped by "paralysis by lawsuit-ysis".
I wouldn't want to be the laywer stuck defending him in that scenario.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: yes, it's true that before the fatal rocket mishap, my client did amass his fortune via games in which devices called 'rocket launchers' could be said to figure, um, in an incendiary capacity..."
When you're only now getting your box up from a lethargic start, you really take a gamble when you announce a far superior version on another continent. Apparently Sony sees no way to win the current console race without adding more functionality.
Well, ironically, that's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not only the competition that this affects. I was close to pulling the trigger on a PS3, but Sony has given me another reason to wait. (Price and more games being the other reasons.)
As Master Po might say: Patience, feature grasshopper.:-)
I would be happy if in games we could talk about homosexuality
What? Spongebob Squarepants isn't enough?!
but we're not even at the point where we can admit that humans have heterosexual relationships, and that is a real problem - and it tends to show that games are not being seen, even by our own ratings boards, as an artform
Pssst. Those Sims with the little hearts over the avatars? That's not a secret Masonic password, fella.
"I want to see a game with real sexual content in a store here in Germany - I don't think it will happen unless we really recognise games as an artform," he told the audience. He pointed to Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, which "discusses relationship issues that you have in a marriage". "You don't have that in games - it is time to wake up and make it happen."
So games need more Nicole Kidman fantasizing about infidelity while you, as Tom Cruise, infiltrate a coven of America's elite who just happen to hold their orgies at the estate of the Federal Reserve Chairman while performing Gothic chants in red velvet hoodies?
I like Paul, too. A rarity among the swine who dominate American politics. In fact, he appeals to me more than do any of the leading Democrats, although I am to the left of all of them.
Paul's anti-war and anti-IRS positions address our central problem: we cannot sustain our misshapen and violent empire, nor should we try.
Under the mutant Reagan-Clinton-Bush vision of government, tax revenues are collected primarily for military expansion and subsidizing corporate profits. Meanwhile the essence of any society -- its education, health, environmental and civic infrastructure -- has in our case gone sour.
The IRS is a shakedown machine for spreading this cancerous vision. Eliminate it, defund empire, and then we can begin making our nation the decent republic of our ancient aspirations.
It's got nothing to do with being incorrect, since there is no "correct" grammar and no universal English. You can't apply your local grammar to other locations any more than you can apply your local accent to other speakers.
These may be great ideas (or not, of course), but it doesn't matter - I don't have the capacity to bring them to fruition, so no one will ever find out.
Oh, sure. The nice thing about these Internets is what you say to one million people here, stays here.;-)
But seriously: your devolving world RPG idea is a good one, IMO. The problem with most game paradigms is their relentless linearity and immutable conditions. And your idea neatly addresses that. Go pitch it to someone in a suit.
Further along these lines I'd like to see better adaptive pattern-recognition algorithms in game world logic. Graphics, shmaphics. Games must become able to outwit us. Tyrannize us. We need games that have the mind of a poker wiz and the fetid black soul of a Trump.
These are the most affluent 1%, possibly with a large amount of overlap with the 1% who are likeliest to spend their disposable income on your products.
For commercial sites, recognizing that fact makes sense.
For every non-commercial usage of the web, we can happily ignore the rarefied 1%, their spending habits and their choice in luxury cell phones. What they want, do or how they surf: pffffft, who cares?
It's pretty clear you think Slashdot is a news site. In basic sense that's true, but the definition of "news" you're operating with is a romantic 20th century one: some kind of more-or-less objective utterance benignly prepared for you by noble, disinterested parties.
Not only did such purity in news reporting scarcely ever exist, as you might discover by reading Manufacturing Consent, but whatever elements of it did exist have largely been abandoned by corporations and are also little in evidence online in 21st century news and blogging.
Slashdot's advocacy journalism. It's about promoting what its editors like and dissing what they don't. (It's in the comments that the correctives and tonics are found.) The sooner you accept that this is a lobbying site with its own fairly transparent agendas, the happier you'll be here.
And we should be at least as honest as Orwell was in his unforgettable essay, Down the Mine. He took up this problem seventy years ago. After painting the unhuman conditions for British miners in the 30s, he makes this brutal admission in closing:
In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an 'intellectual' and a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants -- all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.
That isn't immensely helpful thinking. It does nothing to improve the lot of "poor drudges," but it acknowledges what most polemicists don't: that after all our fine talk about fairness and opportunity and hard work and everybody getting ahead, what most want isn't that at all. We want to keep some people down so that we may be kept up.
We hardly need limit this to Orwell's era or social context, either--in its bluntness, it's a very American realization. From the slave trade and coolie labor and the United Fruit Company to today's overseas sweatshops, we have always been wont to use others badly. Orwell's forebears may have had much longer to perfect the art of working foreigners to death, but we've been quick studies.
Now, of course, we are again using our own badly. The dreary Wal-Mart economy is a grim joke upon a nation whose favorite self-congratulatory myth is the offer of generalized prosperity in the American Dream! Outsourcing, H1B hiring and vast forced-work prison labor populations also mock the myth, show how empty it's become.
And so yes, build robots to pick oranges because it's cruel labor for people. But five minutes after the robots start plucking oranges, migrant farm populations will be available for new cruel usage by new masters. It's not the hot sun or the work that brutalizes them so much as it is an ethos. Please build a machine that can change that!
Who reads this angry fanboi drivel? It's a new phone (been there) with email and stuff (done that): it's hardly revolutionizing business (no SDKs) so why should IT bend over backwards, completely gut their defacto standards (yes, I'm talking about Exchange), just so the corporate users can play with their shiny new baubles at work?
I agree. Most would say it's a stretch to pass off a luxury phone for peculiarly snarky aesthetes as a business device, but they're just not daring enough.
"Make no mistake, when IT blowhards dismiss the iPhone..."
Heh. Sidenote to the self-styled Fireball: in American rhetoric, "make no mistake" is what a politician says moments before a gusher of unadulterated b.s. erupts.
Does Cheney have to visit each house in the US personally, pry open the door with his shotgun, be caught shitting in your pillowcase while installing a keylogger on your PC?
Oh Lord, no. Nothing so extreme. He merely has to ejaculate on an intern.
Until he crosses that gooey Rubicon, we'll let him do anything. Anything he wants. Including to our pillows. Many of us have set aside what we call "the Dick Cheney pillow" just in case we should come home some night, find the house surrounded by NSA sharpshooters and a lone light on inside, while all those present whistle and look as if lordly, leer-muffled grunts aren't issuing from the guest room. The pillow case is well-marked to prevent confusion, it's rubber so it's reusable, and leaving out cookies, milk and Ex-Lax for the Veep is seen as patriotic--a touch of class.
But if he does befoul the person or clothing of an intern who is not his wife--and I refer to the esteemed conservative crusader and author of steamy girl-on-girl fiction, Lynne Cheney--why, then, all bets are off and the doors of finer VFW cantinas along with the hearts of NASCAR fans will close to his elephantine person forever.
Gender doesn't matter yet although IANAL, I'd recommend he choose a young woman if he is considering this tragic course. That side of the genetic divide offers plausible deniability in a way that, say, catching him with a NCAA recruit or Navy SEAL would not. He can say the tart led him on, pretended to know the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden which secret knowledge exists in a biological larynx-based cipher that can only be decrypted by the key of his thrusting tumescent person. Or in the alternative, simply assert that he mistook her for an oil company spill and briefly (if understandably) lost control. He'd have to resign, of course, and suffer the indignities of a massive public pension for the remainder of his days. But since with all his heart kit he's practically a cyborg, anyway, there'd be a lot of those.
I'd like to be persuaded, Gary. But you've ignored my arguments while reciting what is, by your own admission, "poetic" fluff about the matter. Let's review.
1) Irrespective of your fantasies about Jobs as a lifetime foe of DRM, the fact is he enabled the music biz to foist it upon us through iTMS for several years. Then he helped labels raise prices for its removal. Neither piece of mischief "fixed" the music biz, at least where consumers are concerned. But these efforts did aid and abet a very nasty industry at a time when consumers were telling it to change its pricing and distribution models.
2) Your Apple-polishing aside, it's far too early to judge whether the iPhone will have the least positive impact upon the phone industry. All you can raise is the claim that Apple's entrance will help "the handset maker and the wireless carrier realize that their ultimate customer is you," a Polyannaish outburst that I somehow imagine you uttering after a long suck on a helium cannister. Combating oligopolists with a $600 phone that's too expensive for most people to buy? We'll see if that makes Jobs the new cellphone Che, but I doubt it.
Then again, two million may just parse the size of fanboydom (including both pre- and post-op Switchers), so let's not be hasty. Surely somebody's out there suffering along with Windows Safari and congratulating himself for running badly-performing, under-featured beta code. Lord knows, he's probably blogging about his own ultimate funkiness right now...
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post: a Slashdot Hall-of-Fame nominee.
Forget the terrorists. Deranged Islamists included, nobody hates our freedoms as much as we ourselves do. Or more precisely: as our rulers do. Our rulers have bent and malformed our liberties, keeping us in hallucinatory levels of fear so we will be obedient. This odious game sickens every free-thinking man and woman.
For one sharp view on this problem, see Adam Curtis' series of insightful and often amusing BBC films streamable via Google Video. Pick any one, they're all brilliant:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=adam+curtis&sitesearch=
...presently, however, the entire Apple campus has more serious concerns. Namely, debating whether to make the new reflective dock more opaque and less reflective, or more reflective and less opaque. No decision will be made in this more pressing matter until all viable options have been weighed and cross-checked violently against the Human Interface Guidelines by interns prepared to impale themselves upon the nearest pixel for The Cause, or until Steve Jobs has a screaming jag and fires some poor sap who didn't genuflect long enough. Whichever comes first. For now, don't move any files, mmkay?
No one reason, I reply stroking the Van Dyke beard that looks so rakish with a black turtleneck (it has fully grown back in since that regrettable incident with the calipers, thank you for asking).
For a full analysis of my shopping habits, perhaps it is better if I quote from my ten part, 3,400-word blog post on the subject, which can be found carefully archived at my site, DaringTurdball.com.
"When I see a new car ad on TV and just have to 'run out' and buy the music playing in the background, there are few things I like to put in order first. You might call them 'ducks,' and say I am getting them 'in a row'--but just make sure it's a digital row, and that the ducks are all downsampled audio recordings. Ha, ha--or should I say, Quack quack!"
"One, I don't want too high a bitrate. High bitrates are known to use up A.R.S.E. (Auditory Response Synchronization Energy), a finite resource found in the resonant bones that frame the auditory canal. In layman's terms, higher bitrates wear out ears faster. You only have so much A.R.S.E. Why splurge?"
"Second, I take the 'fidelity' in high fidelity seriously. That's why I want to lock down my music as securely as a 13th century feudal lord securing his wife's genitals before he rides off to the Crusades. Doing so requires strong DRM so that my musical 'honey pots' don't end up getting 'stirred' by any other portable music players. I like knowing my songs are safe and won't be getting roughly used by a Zune on the side."
"Third, like most Americans, I don't want to pay too little. Everyone knows there's a direct relationship between price and quality. I like knowing my song has received that extra special touch of attention, even if it's just someone leaving on a light for it at Apple. Who knows? Maybe while it was waiting to be downloaded, The Steve walked by and gave it the old 'thumbs up' or even a 'peace sign'!"
"Adequately priced low-bitrate songs belted down with high-quality DRM so that they won't fall out of my iPod: yes, it's what I call a musical 'match made in heaven'--thank you, iTMS!"
If by "amazing" you mean the flowchart/planning stuff and an app for making lists of your DVD collection, then please stop bloviating. The Omni apps are competent but suffer from needlessly complex UI. Delicious Monster is a vanity app. Do something about your low amazement threshold before the next daffodil reduces you to tears.
Rubbish.
I own the N800 and it's been many months since a firmware update fixed its sound synching problems.
Furthermore, while it's true the N800 can't do H.264, who cares? It does Divx. I shouldn't have to tell you why that's more important to most people online.
As for compatibility, it's a tiny Linux box. There's more software for it than there ever will be for the Touch. And free, as in beer.
True, the N800 UI isn't as slick as Apple's legendary work. But it's quite far from being primitive or backwards -- the rant you link to is absurdly fussy. With all due respect to the designer, UIs have come a long way since the Newton, and we're all pretty able to figure out how to use them.
And yes I do expect Apple will slaughter the n800. Nokia's unsure how to market it and frankly, few want to carry around electronic devices for reading and entering text. The Touch's great virtue is that it speaks directly to a trendy, post-literate tribe: the very people who want to see YouTube videos of guys crashing BMX bikes into a river or catch the latest Shakira video. Touch away, darlings.
Not to be an alarmist or anything.
But it's not like they'll face stiff resistance taking over..
http://www.redlers.com/downloadtemplate.html
Mellel is fast, intuitive, powerfully adaptive, well-supported and affordable. The cream of the crop in indy OS X word processors.
I wouldn't want to be the laywer stuck defending him in that scenario.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: yes, it's true that before the fatal rocket mishap, my client did amass his fortune via games in which devices called 'rocket launchers' could be said to figure, um, in an incendiary capacity..."
On balance, still somewhat safer than in the Bush administration.
When you're only now getting your box up from a lethargic start, you really take a gamble when you announce a far superior version on another continent. Apparently Sony sees no way to win the current console race without adding more functionality.
Well, ironically, that's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not only the competition that this affects. I was close to pulling the trigger on a PS3, but Sony has given me another reason to wait. (Price and more games being the other reasons.)
As Master Po might say: Patience, feature grasshopper. :-)
What? Spongebob Squarepants isn't enough?!
but we're not even at the point where we can admit that humans have heterosexual relationships, and that is a real problem - and it tends to show that games are not being seen, even by our own ratings boards, as an artform
Pssst. Those Sims with the little hearts over the avatars? That's not a secret Masonic password, fella.
"I want to see a game with real sexual content in a store here in Germany - I don't think it will happen unless we really recognise games as an artform," he told the audience. He pointed to Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, which "discusses relationship issues that you have in a marriage". "You don't have that in games - it is time to wake up and make it happen."
So games need more Nicole Kidman fantasizing about infidelity while you, as Tom Cruise, infiltrate a coven of America's elite who just happen to hold their orgies at the estate of the Federal Reserve Chairman while performing Gothic chants in red velvet hoodies?
Mouse control or not?
Paul's anti-war and anti-IRS positions address our central problem: we cannot sustain our misshapen and violent empire, nor should we try.
Under the mutant Reagan-Clinton-Bush vision of government, tax revenues are collected primarily for military expansion and subsidizing corporate profits. Meanwhile the essence of any society -- its education, health, environmental and civic infrastructure -- has in our case gone sour.
The IRS is a shakedown machine for spreading this cancerous vision. Eliminate it, defund empire, and then we can begin making our nation the decent republic of our ancient aspirations.
Just so -- now tell it to the British Council. ;-)
Oh, sure. The nice thing about these Internets is what you say to one million people here, stays here.
But seriously: your devolving world RPG idea is a good one, IMO. The problem with most game paradigms is their relentless linearity and immutable conditions. And your idea neatly addresses that. Go pitch it to someone in a suit.
Further along these lines I'd like to see better adaptive pattern-recognition algorithms in game world logic. Graphics, shmaphics. Games must become able to outwit us. Tyrannize us. We need games that have the mind of a poker wiz and the fetid black soul of a Trump.
"Phasers on Stalin!"
For commercial sites, recognizing that fact makes sense.
For every non-commercial usage of the web, we can happily ignore the rarefied 1%, their spending habits and their choice in luxury cell phones. What they want, do or how they surf: pffffft, who cares?
Not only did such purity in news reporting scarcely ever exist, as you might discover by reading Manufacturing Consent, but whatever elements of it did exist have largely been abandoned by corporations and are also little in evidence online in 21st century news and blogging.
Slashdot's advocacy journalism. It's about promoting what its editors like and dissing what they don't. (It's in the comments that the correctives and tonics are found.) The sooner you accept that this is a lobbying site with its own fairly transparent agendas, the happier you'll be here.
That isn't immensely helpful thinking. It does nothing to improve the lot of "poor drudges," but it acknowledges what most polemicists don't: that after all our fine talk about fairness and opportunity and hard work and everybody getting ahead, what most want isn't that at all. We want to keep some people down so that we may be kept up.
We hardly need limit this to Orwell's era or social context, either--in its bluntness, it's a very American realization. From the slave trade and coolie labor and the United Fruit Company to today's overseas sweatshops, we have always been wont to use others badly. Orwell's forebears may have had much longer to perfect the art of working foreigners to death, but we've been quick studies.
Now, of course, we are again using our own badly. The dreary Wal-Mart economy is a grim joke upon a nation whose favorite self-congratulatory myth is the offer of generalized prosperity in the American Dream! Outsourcing, H1B hiring and vast forced-work prison labor populations also mock the myth, show how empty it's become.
And so yes, build robots to pick oranges because it's cruel labor for people. But five minutes after the robots start plucking oranges, migrant farm populations will be available for new cruel usage by new masters. It's not the hot sun or the work that brutalizes them so much as it is an ethos. Please build a machine that can change that!
What are ya, son, a Communist? ;-)
I agree. Most would say it's a stretch to pass off a luxury phone for peculiarly snarky aesthetes as a business device, but they're just not daring enough.
"Make no mistake, when IT blowhards dismiss the iPhone..."
Heh. Sidenote to the self-styled Fireball: in American rhetoric, "make no mistake" is what a politician says moments before a gusher of unadulterated b.s. erupts.
Oh Lord, no. Nothing so extreme. He merely has to ejaculate on an intern.
Until he crosses that gooey Rubicon, we'll let him do anything. Anything he wants. Including to our pillows. Many of us have set aside what we call "the Dick Cheney pillow" just in case we should come home some night, find the house surrounded by NSA sharpshooters and a lone light on inside, while all those present whistle and look as if lordly, leer-muffled grunts aren't issuing from the guest room. The pillow case is well-marked to prevent confusion, it's rubber so it's reusable, and leaving out cookies, milk and Ex-Lax for the Veep is seen as patriotic--a touch of class.
But if he does befoul the person or clothing of an intern who is not his wife--and I refer to the esteemed conservative crusader and author of steamy girl-on-girl fiction, Lynne Cheney--why, then, all bets are off and the doors of finer VFW cantinas along with the hearts of NASCAR fans will close to his elephantine person forever.
Gender doesn't matter yet although IANAL, I'd recommend he choose a young woman if he is considering this tragic course. That side of the genetic divide offers plausible deniability in a way that, say, catching him with a NCAA recruit or Navy SEAL would not. He can say the tart led him on, pretended to know the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden which secret knowledge exists in a biological larynx-based cipher that can only be decrypted by the key of his thrusting tumescent person. Or in the alternative, simply assert that he mistook her for an oil company spill and briefly (if understandably) lost control. He'd have to resign, of course, and suffer the indignities of a massive public pension for the remainder of his days. But since with all his heart kit he's practically a cyborg, anyway, there'd be a lot of those.
Did I answer your question?
1) Irrespective of your fantasies about Jobs as a lifetime foe of DRM, the fact is he enabled the music biz to foist it upon us through iTMS for several years. Then he helped labels raise prices for its removal. Neither piece of mischief "fixed" the music biz, at least where consumers are concerned. But these efforts did aid and abet a very nasty industry at a time when consumers were telling it to change its pricing and distribution models.
2) Your Apple-polishing aside, it's far too early to judge whether the iPhone will have the least positive impact upon the phone industry. All you can raise is the claim that Apple's entrance will help "the handset maker and the wireless carrier realize that their ultimate customer is you," a Polyannaish outburst that I somehow imagine you uttering after a long suck on a helium cannister. Combating oligopolists with a $600 phone that's too expensive for most people to buy? We'll see if that makes Jobs the new cellphone Che, but I doubt it.
Two predictions, though.
1) It'll survive better than the egos of its owners after it's scratched up a bit.
2) Due to 1), there's going to be a busy market in refurbs.
Then again, two million may just parse the size of fanboydom (including both pre- and post-op Switchers), so let's not be hasty. Surely somebody's out there suffering along with Windows Safari and congratulating himself for running badly-performing, under-featured beta code. Lord knows, he's probably blogging about his own ultimate funkiness right now...